CyberGen explores racialised Europeans’ experiences, views and socio-political engagements in postcolonial Europe, and notably participants’ views, perspectives and socio-political analyses on questions of identity, gender, diversity and racism in the society they grew up in. The project contributes to shed light on the lived experiences of gendered discrimination, racism and islamophobia recounted by participating women across two different socio-political contexts.
The project equally builds on participants’ views to examine the varied meanings, uses, appropriation and resistance to terms that name racialised Europeans of migrant descent – from persons with a migration background, to minority ethnic individuals, to racialised individuals, to hybrid constructions such as German-Turk, or else to the collective assignations of the so-called 2nd or 3rd generations. In this regard and through a comparative analysis the project foregrounds structural differences and similarities across the French and German contexts.
CyberGen also engages with the socio-political activism of those primarily concerned with an analysis of participants’ online practices around anti-racism on Instagram and Twitter. The project thus seeks to offer an intersectional reflection on how postcolonial Europe is being actively produced through constant boundary negotiations around who is deemed as more or less belonging, while shedding light on the material and affective implications of these shifting hierarchies.
The implementation of the CyberGen project has also led to methodological reflections around how diaspora and migration research can reproduce forms of epistemological violence, e.g. by ‘speaking for’ or reifying socio-ethnic categorizations. The fellow engaged with feminist and decolonial contributions to explore how participatory methods within diaspora and migration research can strengthen the social validity and relevance of academic knowledge in this field. In that sense, the interviews departed from biographical approaches to revolve instead around participants’ views, perspectives and socio-political engagements. The interviews sought to provide participants with greater leverage in shaping the content and direction of the conversation. The project explored the epistemological possibilities opened up by these conversations while also critically assessing its limits against the background of, on the hand, structural constraints as to what counts as ‘knowledge’, and, on the other, persistent challenges in transforming the power relations that underpin the interviewer-interviewee configuration.
Finally, the mixed method approach, bringing together qualitative interviews and data-mining of Twitter data, allowed for a nuanced analysis of rapidly changing and circulating discourses at the intersection of gendered issues and Islamophobia. The identification of specific types of discourses and configurations of actors thanks to the topic-domain structuration of a database of 123k tweets fine-grained our analysis beyond the level of dominant political and media discourses.
Overall, publications stemming from this research project can inform policy discussions towards the achievement of more inclusive European democracies by facilitating the social and political engagements of citizens exposed to a combination of racialized and gendered forms of othering.
